The LuxSci FYI Blog

by Erik Kangas, PhD, CEO

Posts Tagged ‘server’

The server your email is hosted on had a power supply issue and now your email is down … and will remain down for a few hours until your provider repairs the hardware issue and gets you back online.

Downtime sucks and it can hurt your business. However, you can protect yourself from downtime due to hardware failure issues like this.

LuxSci offers two service options: Business Class and Enterprise Class. The most notable difference between these options is reliability. Enterprise Class services (both dedicated and shared) will keep running even if the underlying server hardware fails. How does that work?

It happens to everyone who uses any email service: suddenly your email is no longer working. If it’s just for a few minutes or some scheduled time at night, it’s usually no big deal. However, if it’s in the middle of your work day and you rely on email, you may have a big problem.

What do you do if your email stays offline for 5 minutes … 10 minutes … an hour … and you don’t know when it is coming back?

LuxSci has just introduced a new user interface for dedicated server customers. The dedicated server management interface allows customers to view real-time and historical information about their server performance and capacity, enables iptables firewall management, and places certain system management commands in the hands of account administrators.

Insight into server health and metrics is important for capacity planning and for diagnosing and resolving performance issues. The system metrics and reports exposed in the dedicated server management interface were previously only available to LuxSci support staff. Now, account administrators can access this same information on demand and perform tasks such as server reboots, apache restarts, and firewall edits when needed without the assistance of technical support.

LuxSci has a history of helping businesses with mission-critical needs by providing highly customized solutions on dedicated server(s) at Rackspace. These are fully-outsourced, high performing, reliable, and private instances of LuxSci’s email, web hosting, and SecureForm services, managed and supported by LuxSci.

In response, LuxSci has expanded its dedicated offerings to include ones that are significantly less expensive. We now have 3 types of dedicated server offerings, starting from $100/mo and with no long-term contract:

LuxSci has for a long time offered both dedicated physical servers, as well as dedicated virtual private servers located in our private cloud. Now that we have signed HIPAA Business Associate Agreements with Rackspace for their public cloud infrastructure, we are able to offer dedicated virtual private servers that reside there … to all customers: those with compliance needs and those without. The ease of public cloud server management and the low underlying cost of these solutions enables LuxSci to provide its services on them to its customers at a much lower price point than was previously possible.

Our new Premium Server Environment will provide complete resilience against hardware failures. Yes, WebMail and inbound email filtering run on many servers and are load balanced. However, currently, your email server and web server, and certain database servers do not benefit from high availability. This means that while your account runs on high quantity hardware and while backups are made, a hardware failure (e.g. a ram chip going bad) can cause the server to fail and be offline while it is replaced. This kind of downtime is rare, but it has happened at LuxSci over the last few years (as it is inevitable with any provider).

LuxSci continues to offer premium shared email and web hosting services on premium servers in a premium data center for the best possible performance, security, and privacy. This has the unfortunate side effect of making some of the services more expensive than if they were offered via a less premium environment. In particular, the per-gigabyte cost of disk space.

In order to offer better pricing options to customers who need large amounts of disk space and who are able to be a bit less restrictive on security, privacy, and reliability, LuxSci now offers new customers a choice of “Premium” and “Basic Server Environments“.

LuxSci users have a new setting whereby they can choose to have copies of all messages that they send via SMTP from their email programs automatically delivered to their “sent” email folder on the server. This is advantageous in that: